The consumption society and the apathy for the public realm: the invisible slavery and the instrumental policy by Hannah Arendt

Abstract

Erecting the increase of wealth and abundance as a primary objective for the active vita was already devised as the axiomatic premise of classical political economy, as well as the idealized dream of the poor and dispossessed people. There was, however, a certain utopian hope that by living in a society with greater wealth the citizens would more fully seek the development of appropriate conscious abstention from labor and consumption in their free time, ie: free from pain and of the effort to work and to consume, the animal laborans would become productive for itself, nourishing itself with "superior" activities. However, how much free time the laborans has, the greater are their appetites for consumption, and more than that, an abundant society properly exposes the fallacy of that previous reasoning, since everything can be reified and marketed. This article intends to analyze the phenomenon of contemporary consumer society as a cog in the life cycle, describing why the citizens have just an instrumental policy in their own processes of labor and consumption. This alienation promotes the victory of animal laborans over zoon politikon.